


Fight fire with fire

by alutea



Series: Infinite Jest: Third Time Will Be the Charm, Maybe [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Essays, Infinite Jest - Freeform, Other, Swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-29
Updated: 2020-10-29
Packaged: 2021-03-08 19:22:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,574
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27271873
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alutea/pseuds/alutea
Summary: In which I'm a little depressed and pick up David Foster Wallace'sInfinite Jestfor the third time.
Relationships: David Foster Wallace's brilliant mind/Reader
Series: Infinite Jest: Third Time Will Be the Charm, Maybe [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1991284
Comments: 3
Kudos: 1





	Fight fire with fire

It's a rainy, chilly Wednesday afternoon. I'm a little depressed, partly because of [this thing I fucked up in execution if not intention](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27230290), which my brain tells me is a Thing to Be Depressed About, while another part of me laughs because it's such a small thing and there are so many other things. _So_ many other things. You all know what things, so I'll skip the enumeration.

These are not-fun times. Are they uniquely hard? I mean, yes, of course "uniquely"—we're facing challenges that no other generation has faced before us, but then other generations had to conquer their own challenges too. As my socially-distanced colleague is fond of saying, no king of the olden days could have boasted of our (Western, privileged) standard of living. Modern medicine! Large carbon foot-printed air-travel (temporarily grounded)! Fresh food all year 'round! ~~Antibiotics in our soil!~~ Super-computers that fit into the palm of our hands (and they make calls! and take pictures!) Toilets! (In fact, I recently read that the courtiers of King Louis XIV would zip into corridors of Versailles to piss against the walls. Um. I'll just [leave this here](http://www.frockflicks.com/crap-at-versailles-like-literally/).)

Maybe one hard thing that's uniquely hard for us is the connectedness that allows us a sense of intimacy with people we might admire but whom we may never meet or even talk to face-to-face with, and which then turns around and blares their (very human) failings into our faces. It is actually more sinister than that, because many of these people are actively trying to make us like them, love them, trying to sell us a curated image of themselves. (Yes, of course we all curate our own images on the Internet. The important piece, I think, is "sell.") The sense of betrayal when things go wrong is very real. I don't know what it does to our collective consciousness when it happens over and over again.

I no longer have heroes. None that are real people, anyway. I suppose I've now retrofitted fandom to fill that gap.

I don't really know what to do about the artist vs. creative work debate. The things I can bear to give up, I have. Michael Jackson's "Heal the World" and "Man in the Mirror." (Hah, what a bitter fucking laugh.) His other songs never really spoke to me, so they were easier. _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_ (the set that's autographed) has sat unwatched on my shelf for years, while I gave my other set away. So has _X-Men: First Class_. I can't bear to watch anything Mel Gibson anymore, though he was a family favorite for years. (I remember _Mad Max_ being the first film I watched with my dad. It gave me nightmares.) I don't know yet what I'll do about _Call Me By Your Name._ How I'll feel about it in a week or a month.

Oh, lest I make the same mistake of assuming knowledge a reader might not have that I did in my other doomed fore-mentioned post:

  * Michael Jackson was [a pedophile](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaving_Neverland).
  * Joss Whedon, creator of _Buffy_ (and lots of other things I've liked), [cheated on his wife Kai Cole](https://www.thewrap.com/joss-whedon-feminist-hypocrite-infidelity-affairs-ex-wife-kai-cole-says/).
  * Michael Fassbender, who plays Magneto, [physically abused his ex-girlfriend Sunawin 'Leasi' Andrews](https://www.indiewire.com/2018/02/michael-fassbender-abuse-allegations-sunawin-leasi-andrews-1201927946/). Bryan Singer, who directed the original _X-Men_ film and produced _First Class_ , [abused underage boys](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryan_Singer#Sexual_abuse_allegations).
  * Mel Gibson made [anti-Semitic](https://www.latimes.com/la-gibson1aug01-transripit-story.html) comments and [physically abused his ex-girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva](https://www.cnn.com/2010/SHOWBIZ/celebrity.news.gossip/11/17/mel.gibson.dispute/index.html).
  * Armie Hammer, who plays Oliver in _CMBYN_ , [cheated on his wife](https://www.thecut.com/2020/10/what-happened-with-armie-hammer-and-lily-james.html) [Elizabeth Chambers](https://www.drewreportsnews.com/2020/10/25/armie-hammer-elizabeth-chambers-marriage-fell-apart-due-to-explicit-text-messages-to-adeline/).



(I consider the basic facts in the above list to be credible based on my own judgment. You may not, and that's okay too. You can just take it as a data point in your mental image of me.)

Why the long depressing introduction in a post supposedly about _Infinite Jest_ , you ask? David Foster Wallace, its author, was also [abusive towards a woman with whom he had a relationship, Mary Karr](https://www.bustle.com/p/mary-karr-speaks-out-about-david-foster-wallace-amid-literatures-metoo-movement-9003387).

I only discovered DFW recently, after I accidentally came across his beautiful Kenyon College speech, ["This is Water"](https://fs.blog/2012/04/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/). I've since devoured his collected essays. Reading his fiction, though, was like running head-on into a brick wall. His Hideous Men (shudder). _Oblivion_. I've already given up on _Infinite Jest_ twice. 

I'm an unsophisticated reader by literary standards. Discussions about post-modernism go right over my head, and I feel no urgent need to Google it. The authors I love, I love for character- and world-building. Fantasy is my genre.

DFW is antithesis to at least the character part. As [Zadie Smith](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zadie_Smith) explains in her essay "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men: the difficult gifts of David Foster Wallace": "And if one is used to the consolation of "character," well then Wallace is truly a dead end. His stories simply don't investigate character; they don't intend to. Instead they're turned outward, toward us. It's our character that's being investigated."

So why am I turning to _Infinite Jest_ for a third time? Zadie Smith, again:

> That he ended up a fiction writer at all speaks to the radical way Wallace saw his own gifts—not as a natural resource to be exploited but as a suspicious facility to be interrogated. Certainly that unusual triune skill set—encyclopedic knowledge, mathematical prowess, complex dialectical thought—would have had an easier passage to approval within the academic world from which he hailed than in the literary world he joined. Instead, in his twenties, Wallace chose the path of most resistance. He turned from a career in math and philosophy to pursue a vocation in what he called "morally passionate, passionately moral fiction."  
> 

Imagine the kind of person who is able to _view his gifts with suspicion_ while the rest of us (me) are still trying very hard to convince ourselves we have any.

Imagine the kind of world where we all treat our gifts with a little suspicion. Maybe then we'll be more inclined to think _My gifts were given to me but they are not intended for me. They are meant to be turned outward, used in service of something greater._ Extrorsicized, even.

Reading these two brilliant writers, I 1) am very glad I write only for fun and 2) am imbued with an awe of what the written word is capable of.

David Foster Wallace makes me feel like I can play four-dimensional chess. Or that I'm watching a master do so, which is just as—maybe more—exhilarating. Sometimes, when my brain is racing along at frenetic speed and I can't seem to get it to _shut up already_ , I can enfold myself in his words and be soothed into joyful concordance. Sometimes he inspires the frenetic speed. In good ways, mostly.

But on the other hand I am no longer able to wholly "trust the consciousness of the agenda behind the text." This brilliant man, who "offered everything he had to his readers, including the kitchen sink," who was able to dissect human nature with a keen yet compassionate eye, who struggled with addiction as well as the depression that eventually took his life, was yet unable to treat someone he claimed to love with consistent kindness and respect. And you find this uncomfortable view of women in other places too, most notably in his unabashed description of his (humorous, wink-wink-nudge-nudge) crush on the cabin steward Petra ("the diaphanous and epicanthically doe-eyed Petra," to be precise, who knows "only two English clauses") in "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" followed by his disappointment at realizing she takes such good care of him not because of any feelings she has for him in particular, but because it's her job. Um. To be fair, the latter is set in a longer exposition regarding the despair that's eventually engendered by service without real caring. Um. To be fair, please don't hit on the service staff, DFW. (The hitting-on isn't just subtext—it's text, if only in a footnote. #57.)

We are called upon to answer the hard questions so often these days. To try to hold all the contradictions in our heads (not least, of course, our own) until we sit down at the dinner table one day just to cry. I have not been able to give DFW up. Nor—on maybe the opposite side of the spectrum, _Harry Potter_ , despite its creator's [transphobia](https://news.google.com/articles/CAIiEIcT1XUj_MWFoWvZ02ut2WIqGAgEKg8IACoHCAow6KLyCTDY8XIwtqfsBQ?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen). It's not a coincidence that both of these are creations of the written word, my first love. And yes, _CMBYN_ was a book before it was a movie, though I saw the movie first. We'll see if that turns out to matter in the end.

So, _Infinite Jest_. I've actually enjoyed [readers' reactions to the book](http://infinitesummer.org/) more so far than the book itself. Maybe my reactions will give someone enjoyment too. Or maybe they'll simply sit in my collection of "Essays" secretly mildly subverting a space that people have told me is meant solely for fanwork creations.

I intend to write a little something about each chapter. Possibly very little. We'll see.

I've been promised mind-expansion. I can do with some mind-expansion.

Spoilers to follow, of course.

Words DFW made me look up:

  * extrorse [adj] - Facing outward; turned away from the axis. [Late Latin extrorsus outward = Latin extr(a)- extra- + (v)orsus turned]
  * epicanthically (epicanthus [n]) - a fold of skin extending vertically over the inner angle of the eye: characteristic of Mongolian peoples and a congenital anomaly among other races. [New Latin, from epi- + Latin canthus corner of the eye, from Greek kanthos] WTF, dude.




End file.
